Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Audacious is an open-source music player developed in GTK3, having the features of a modern music player, including support for audio effects, equalizer, lyrics and plugins, visualization, support for Winamp skins and support for playlists organized in tabs.
The latest version available is Audacious 3.6 Beta 1, which has been released a while ago. Starting with Audacious 3.6 the developers started creating an UI in Qt5.
Major changes in this version:
- A completely new Qt-based user interface, which can be installed alongside the existing GTK+ and Winamp Classic interfaces. The new interface is usable today but not yet as feature-rich as the existing interfaces. In future, it will be the basis of a Mac OS X port of Audacious—stay tuned.
- We have switched back to using GTK+ version 2.x by default. It has now been over three years since the release of GTK+ 3.0, and yet the “legacy” version of the toolkit provides more features relevant to Audacious, better cross-platform support, a more stable API, and lower memory usage. Audacious can still be built with GTK3 if desired, but we recommend the GTK2 variant for any desktop environment other than GNOME 3.
- The source code has been converted from C99 to C++11. In addition to making the Qt port easier, the use of C++11 is already allowing more rapid development by letting the compiler work out many details that previously had to be written by hand. The plugin API has also been changed to C++. Contact us if you have a plugin for Audacious that you want help updating.
Requested features added (or brought back):
- Double-size scaling of Winamp skins
- Searching by genre in the search tool plugin
- The playlist manager can be docked in the GTK+ interface
- Crossfading on seek and manual song change
- Support for “album artist” in song tags
- Search results are filtered by number of songs in the search tool plugin
- Cue files are automatically added to playlists and to the library
- Song lengths read from ID3 tags are sanity-checked
- Adjustable HTTP buffer size
- Optional calculation of a more accurate song length estimate for MP3 files
- Optional skipping of leading and trailing silence in MIDI files
- Restored settings dialog for the SID plugin
For information about bug-fixes, see the official changelog.
In this article I will show you how to install Audacious 3.6 Beta 1 on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Deepin 2014, Peppermint Five, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2.0 and other Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 derivative systems.
Because it is available via PPA, installing Audacious 3.6 Beta 1 on the listed Ubuntu and Linux Mintsystems is easy. All you have to do is add the ppa to your system, update the local repository index and install the audacious and audacious-plugins packages. Like this:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/unstable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install audacious
To run Audacious with the GTK+ interface just open a terminal and audacious and for the Qt interface, type audacious –qt.
Optional, to remove audacious and audacious-plugins, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove audacious
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